Category Archives: Contract
Price and Ali, ‘Broken Circles: Contract Law’s Flawed and Inconsistent Treatment of the Return of Engagement Rings Following a Pre-Marriage Breakup and a Modest Proposal for Reform’
ABSTRACT The question of what jurisprudential model should govern the question of who should be awarded an engagement ring following a failed engagement has vexed courts, wasted judicial resources, resulted in a morass of inconsistent and jurisdictionally varying results, and left parties uncertain and litigious for decades. The question has social, feminist, historical, and economic […]
Miklós Király, ‘The development of rules of interpretation in uniform sales laws’
ABSTRACT This study reviews and compares different sources of uniform substantive law on international sales and contracts, providing an overview of the methods developed to interpret them over the past nine decades. This historical approach helps us to understand the challenges of interpretation. Have uniform law instruments established a common solution for interpreting them? Have […]
Russell Korobkin, ‘Contract Boilerplate and Constitutional Public Policy’
ABSTRACT The modern economy is awash in standard form contracts filled with ‘boilerplate’ terms that are drafted by repeat players and routinely accepted by consumers, employees, and businesses without reading or understanding their content. Standard form contracts weaken but do not subvert party autonomy but they do undermine contract efficiency. While American courts attempt to […]
Davronbek Abdugaffarov, ‘Implied Duties of Care and Deployer Liability for Breach in Contracts Concluded by Autonomous AI Agents’
ABSTRACT This article completes a trilogy, with two companion studies, examining how private international law should respond to cross-border contracts negotiated and concluded entirely by autonomous AI agents. Having established that such contracts admit no choice of law and, for their contractspecific jurisdictional basis, no choice of forum because both doctrines require a bilateral manifestation […]
Radu Bogdan Bobei, ‘The interpretation of transnational law: an approach’
ABSTRACT Transnational law and its areas should not and cannot be treated in isolation, or at least not in absolute isolation, from public international law and the technique of conflict of laws. The concept of interpretation connects the above-mentioned three disciplines, both through process and through concept. This article explores how interpretation, through the so-called […]
Travis Gilly, ‘Never a User: The Third Party the Consent Apparatus cannot see’
ABSTRACT Contemporary governance of consumer artificial intelligence is keyed almost entirely to the user: the person who opened the application, accepted the terms, and can therefore be said to have agreed. That keying is not a drafting habit. It is the load-bearing assumption of the whole apparatus, and it produces a structural blind spot rather […]
Kenneth Abraham, ‘The Legal Architecture of Insurance’
ABSTRACT This Article examines the legal ‘architecture’ of insurance. Insurance policies embody the architecture of insurance. They are its blueprints. Consequently, the Article begins with the history of insurance in the United States, which leads to the single most important feature of insurance architecture: the standardization of coverage, especially in property-casualty insurance. The Article next […]
Dharmapala and Garoupa, ‘The Law of Restitution for Void Contracts: An Economic Analysis’
ABSTRACT This paper develops an economic analysis of the application of the law of restitution to the case of void contracts, when agreements may be unenforceable due to legal invalidity. It develops a simple model in which contracting parties’ agreements potentially impose external harms. The analysis focuses on how alternative restitution regimes affect contracting incentives […]
‘A corn Odyssey: questions about force majeure’
A dispute over a ship stranded in the Black Sea raised two interesting points on force majeure: the meaning of ‘unforeseeable’ and whether a notice requirement was a condition precedent. Inerco agreed to sell Ukrainian corn to ADM Israel, due to be shipped between April and May 2023. A force majeure clause dealing with ‘prevention […]
West, Laster and Gulati, ‘The Dragon Who Wasn’t’
ABSTRACT Section 205 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts declares that every contract imposes a duty on the parties to act in good faith toward and deal fairly with their counterparties. Over the past forty-five years, courts in most states have accepted that declaration as black-letter law, yet have never clearly articulated what the duty […]